In a standard technical interview process, you’re do between one and three phone interviews and then come in for a full day of four to five technical interviews. Then, the company makes its decision and you’re on your way (or not). Sometimes though, the company calls you back with some slightly frustrating news: they want [...]
Although I have, quite literally, made a career in the technical interviewing space, I have mixed feelings on them. They offer a lot of value and most people’s issues with them (“trick questions!” “no relationship to real world coding!” “in the real world you’d just look up stuff like this!”) are easily refuted. However, they’re [...]
Somewhere in the midst of discussions about things like “tailoring your resume to the position,” one of the best pieces of resume advice gets lost: Your resume needs to be accomplishment-oriented. Many resumes that I see do precisely the opposite. They offer bullets like: Contributed to design documents on ________ feature and helped coordinate international [...]
In an ideal world, I’d respond to all the questions I get from people asking for advice. I like helping people; this is why I do what I do! In the real, time-limited world, I can only respond to about 25% of the questions I get from people. If your goal is to get a [...]
An article by Amanda Blum portrays Adria Richards, who has been subjected to the wrath of the internet, in a pretty damning light. Amanda describes Adria as “a bully who uses these instances to her personal gain, driving traffic to her blog.” She cites two interactions with Adria which, admittedly, look pretty bad. Adria comes [...]
No one should have been fired. Now can we all just calm down? Backstory: At PyCon, a python developers conference which purports to have a relatively large percentage of women (only 20% still), two guys made some jokes to each other laced with sexual innuendos (something about the word “dongle”). Adria Richards, a Developer Evangelist, was bothered by [...]
Marissa Mayer’s decision to terminate telecommuting arrangements for Yahoo! employees has ignited a frenzy of negative press. Articles cite how studies have shown that telecommuting arrangements lead to more happier and productive employees. How could Mayer have been so stupid and shortsighted? Surely, this signals the downfall of Yahoo. Interestingly, when I hear reports from people who [...]
You certainly don’t have to inform your manager. Most people don’t, so you wouldn’t be doing anything unethical or even out of the ordinary. In fact, most people inform their manager only after they’ve received and accepted another offer. In some cases, there could be advantages to telling your manager: He/she may be able do something to rectify the [...]
We may not like to admit it, but recruiters and resume screeners see “tiers” in candidates. When they review a resume, it’s not just about matching a Java programmer to a Java role; it’s also about questions like, “Is this candidate good enough? Is he or she likely to pass our interviews? Would he or [...]
Most educated people in the US know that writing with good grammar, spelling, and punctuation — particularly in professional contexts — is obviously important. We know that we need to be mostly flawless here and, in fact, most of us are. (Of course, everyone is prone to some typos, myself included!) From what I’ve been [...]